Slumberland (6 page)

After dropping
le beat presque parfait
, I'd composed the soundtrack for a blue movie called
Splendor in the Ass
. A score
that Rick Chess, a director with whom I'd worked before, deemed “too musical.” I explained to him how the overlap of the progression and the extended glissando matched the sex act's natural music. The rhythmic clapping of the stud's testicles against the star's buttocks accentuated the trombone runs. Her “fuck-me-you-motherfucker-harder-goddammit” guttural scatting was contrapuntal to the lower-register xylophone. Rick started to ask what
mise-en-scène
meant, getting only as far as the
mise
before grabbing me by the elbow and ushering me into the bestiality department. He removed a videotape from a manila envelope and popped it into the editing machine. A bespectacled man, his pants dropped to his ankles, was fucking a chicken. Rick twisted a knob. The music came up. A sound so beautiful it should have been incongruous with the image on the monitor, but it was instead transformative. The man was making love to the chicken, and the chicken was enjoying it. I recognized the musician immediately. It could have only been the Schwa.

Rick Chess fiddled with the hydraulics of his computer chair, raising and lowering his seat in rhythm to the music.

“This is quality footage, but it's unusable. The music is too good. Now the shit is an art film. Some sick fuck in a peep booth on Santa Monica Boulevard doesn't want to jerk off to art—he wants filth.”

“Who is this?” I asked Rick.

He looked at me crazily. “How'm I supposed to know? Came in the mail as an audition tape.”

He tossed me the envelope. The return address read, “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, Slumberland Bar, Goltzstraße 24, 10781 Berlin, Germany.”

“Can I have this?” I asked.

Rick nodded. “Sure, keep it. I want you to use this as an example of what not to do, because you're reverting to your old
ways.” He stuck his hand into his receding, greasy hairline and kept it there. “I want the hack back. I want the DJ Darky who provided nondescript background music for
Lawrence ofa Labia
and
12 Angry Menses
, conveyed the apolitical intrigue in
All the President's Semen
. I don't want the high-concept genius.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Nonplussed in the proper
Kensington-Merriwether
usage of the word, I was only half listening to Rick's harangue. I couldn't believe that distinctive legato that swirled inside my head was coming from the Schwa. I'm not the “it all happens for a reason, God has a plan, everything will work out like an HBO television show” type. Before Rick Chess played that video, the only serendipitous occurrence in my life was that I misspelled “serendipity” during a local spelling bee and thankfully wasn't aboard the bus carrying the area's best spellers to the city finals when it plunged off the Sepulveda Overpass.

This was no happy accident. I turned my attention back to the video. Serenaded by an exquisitely delicate diminuendo, the stud and the hen reached a cackling, groaning, mutual orgasm.

Chess elbowed me in the ribs. “Who came first, the chicken or the egghead?”

 

When I got home I took a good long look at the envelope. I didn't have to be Easy Rawlins to figure out the Schwa didn't send the tape. The use of
esszet ligatur
in “Goltzstraße.” The crosshatched 7s. The handwriting just looked too German.

I called up West German information and over a staticky connection asked for Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann's phone number in West Berlin.

The operator couldn't stop laughing.

“You making fun with me. This must be that American television show . . .” I could hear her flipping through her dictionary. “. . .
Straightforward Kamera
.”

She meant
Candid Camera,
but at $3.75 a minute I wasn't in the mood to correct her.

“So there's no Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann in the Berlin directory?”

“
Nein
. We have an Andreas Dunkelmann auf der Lausitzerstrasse. A Dieter Dunkelmann on Derfflingerstrasse. A Hugo on...”

“What about the Slumberland Bar?”

“Please, hold for that number.”

“Hallo, Slumberland,” the bartender, a woman with a sultry Mae West rasp, yelled into the phone, trying to make herself heard over music and the raucous din. I remember thinking the place sounded dangerous. I asked for Dunkelmann.

“There are many
dunkel
men here. Who do you want to speak with?” she asked, sounding a bit leery. I felt like I was making an international crank call.

“I'd like to speak to Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann.”

The bartender paused for a moment. “You want to speak with maybe a DJ Black Man or a DJ Dark Person?”

Suddenly the cryptogram became obvious. “Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann” was an approximation of my nom de musique, DJ Darky. The bartender explained to me that in German,
Dunkelmann
means “obscurant” or, more literally, “dark man,” and that
Schallplattenunterhalter
was an East German term for “disk jockey.” East Germany being a place where the global predominance of English had yet to suck the fun out of the language's tongue-twisting archaism.

The phone call sealed it: I had to go to Germany. Obviously someone there had heard my music and appreciated it enough to think I was worthy of finding the Schwa. What I couldn't figure out was why all the subterfuge. Why not just tell me where he was?

Music history is rife with no-brainer collaborations that
should've but never happened. Charlie Parker and Arnold Schoenberg. The Osmonds and the Jackson Five. The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats, and though I didn't even have the name recognition of Valerie Smith, Josie's tambourine-shaking sidekick, such a missed opportunity would not befall the Schwa and Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann. If I could figure out a way to raise the funds to get my ass and my record collection to Germany, history would have its perfect beat.

Of course, I wasn't about to sell my beat to Bitch Please or any other track-starved rapper, so I started saving my cash and begging every German Institute and art organization I could find for grant money and a visa. But after discovering that DJs and porno composers don't qualify as musicians or artists, I took another tack. I became a jukebox sommelier.

THE JUKEBOX-SOMMELIER IDEA
came to me not long after hearing the chicken-fucking song, during a night out at Sunny Glens, a dive bar on Robertson Boulevard populated by Hamilton High alums who'd graduated in the bottom third of the previous twenty graduating classes. Bridgette Lopez and I were on one of our rare public dates. Some days I thought I could marry Bridgette. She was a forty-five-year-old divorcée who, during my Sunday-night gigs at La Marina in Playa Del Rey, sat next to the DJ booth, her pudgy legs crossed at the knees and looking like two porpoises trapped in fishnet stockings. She'd ply me with cosmopolitans and five-dollar bills, scratch a long ex-chola burgundy fingernail down my forearm, and request a song or sex act. More often than not I granted both her requests, and by the end of the evening we'd be singing sweet doo-wop oohs and coos and making slow jam vows to love each other always and forever. Apart from having to listen to Heatwave ad infinitum the rest of my days, a life with Bridgette wouldn't have been too bad.

She stuffed quarters into the pool table and I bought drinks. I had to shout to make myself heard over the loud, keening,
post–
Diver Down
Van Halen guitar riffs coming out from the rainbow Wurlitzer. “What you drinking,
pendeja
?” I yelled. Bridgette loved it when I talked dirty to her.

“
Dame una vaso de vino, mayate
.” And I loved when she called me nigger in her woeful Spanish.

“Red or white,
puta?
”

“
Rojo, cabrón
.”

“Red wine,” I screamed into the bartender's ear. He shook his head and slammed down two bottles of bum wine, neither of them red or white. I told him to pour the green even though he was pushing the orange.

Whenever I think of Bridgette I think of the sound of her pool breaks. They were molecular and sounded like an introduction to an organic chemistry textbook. I loved to tape-record them. The cue ball flying toward the pyramid of painted ivory neutrinos as if it'd been shot out of a particle accelerator.

Bridgette sank two solids off a clean, wonderfully cold-blooded-sounding break, and as she lined up her next shot, she took her first sip of Chateau du Ghetto. “Who the fuck is the sommelier here—Big Daddy Kane?” she said with a thick tongue and cough-medicine face.

We both laughed, and spent the rest of the evening shooting pool, wondering if green wine was supposed to be served chilled or at alleyway temperature, and cracking corny rotgut jokes.

“When the bartender said, ‘Would you like the house wine,' I didn't know he meant
crackhouse
wine.”

At some point we tired of the classic rock ‘n' roll thumping from the jukebox. There's only so much Eric Clapton–bluesy Negro mimicry a person can take, and I made a halfhearted comment about reprogramming the jukebox. “I could be a jukebox sommelier.” I'd never said
sommelier
before and I liked how the word sounded coming from my mouth. I looked for an excuse to say it again, but Bridgette beat me to the punch.

“You
could
be a jukebox sommelier,” she suggested in all seriousness. “Nobody ever gives enough thought to what's on the jukebox. It's always the same selection, fifty greatest hits CDs, a mediocre Motown anthology, the essential Billy Joel, a mix tape of Top 40 singles from two years ago, two Los Lobos CDs and that fucking Bob Marley album.”

“
Legend
.”

“That's it,
Legend
. My God, the bar scene has made me hate that fucking record. Drunk white boys singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up.' “

I grabbed a chunk of Bridgette's ass and eased her out the door.

“You want to go back to my place to hear some good music?” I asked her.

“Not if by good music you mean that classical crap you played for me last time.”

“Come on, you got used to it.”

“That's the problem, you listen to that shit long enough, you start thinking you're rich and white. And rich and white is no way to go through life if you happen to be neither.”

Later that night Bridgette Lopez became the first of a notso-select group of women to hear the chicken-fucking song. Back then the ultimate sexual maneuver was to sprinkle cocaine on one's engorged penis just before penetration. I've never done it but the rumored pleasures are boundless, the shared orgasms supposedly more intense and lasting than championship chess. Listening to the chicken-fucking song with her that night was like sprinkling cocaine on my heart.

To this day I don't abide artificial intrusions in my sex play. I prefer natural light and abhor toys, pills, and negligees. My only coital enhancement is the chicken-fucking song. I drape a towel over the TV, put the tape into the VCR, and play it for paramours and other sundry pieces of ass with the bad luck to end
up in my arms. The music adds a Romeo-and-Juliet double-suicide poignancy to the otherwise loveless and in my life almost perfunctory one-night stand. Suddenly everything I say becomes something Khalil Gibran wishes he'd said. Every kiss and caress has the all-or-nothing, give-me-intimacy-or-give-me-death honesty of a Sylvia Plath poem. In my mind, my lumpy full-sized bed becomes the beach in
From Here to Eternity
and I'm Sergeant First Class Burt Lancaster fucking a voluptuous Rhode Island Red on a wet, sandy Hawaiian beach, the tattered sheets crashing over us in waves of cotton and rayon.

The morning after with Bridgette Lopez set the tone for all the rest that would follow. It was arduous and awkward, a runny-egged breakfast of stilted conversation and averted eyes. There is something about the song that embarrasses and shames you like catching yourself picking your nose in public.

The last thing Bridgette ever said to me was, “I'm serious, do the jukebox-sommelier thing.” So I did. I wrote a letter to the Slumberland Bar in Berlin requesting a position as a jukebox sommelier, enclosing a résumé and an unlabeled mix tape. Two weeks later I received a small packet in the mail containing the paperwork for a work visa, a one-way plane ticket, a beer coaster, and a brief letter that stated my salary and equated the finding of my tape to the excavation of King Tut's tomb.

IARRIVED IN BERLIN
on a hazy mid-autumn afternoon, emerging from the coach-class bramble wrinkled, hungry, cold, and funky smelling, but happy as a runaway slave.

The cab ride to the hostel was in a Mercedes-Benz. Apart from a nervous three-block joyride in a Cadillac Seville, it was my first trip in a luxury car. I sank deep into that leather seat, thinking that if I hadn't reached the promised land, Germany was at least a land of maybes and we'll sees.

West Berlin was like a city populated entirely by Quaker abolitionists. Everyone was so nice—to a point. When I showed up to lease my first apartment, the landlord knocked seventy-five deutschmarks off the rent for reparations but wouldn't shake my hand to close the deal. Over time the friendly small talk with the newspaper vendor devolved from “How do you like Germany? Do you plan on staying?” to subtle get-the-fuck-out-of-my-country-nigger musings like, “Wow, I can't believe you've been here three months already? When are you going back to America?” When I went to local jazz clubs like the Quasimodo or the A Train, patrons at the bar would buy me drinks as an excuse to pick my brain about jazz and American racism. This was a typical conversation.